as featured in Desert Exposure Magazine
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Nobody, that is, except me.
As strange as it sounds, I’ve always considered it a privilege to change my children’s--and now my grandchildren’s--diapers.
Other kids? Not so much.
Being a man, since nature has so effectively kept men out of the equation when it comes to baby-raising duties that bond a parent with their child--such as breastfeeding--I had to take my bonding moments where I could find them.
Now, briefly, this isn’t a dissertation about gender stereotypes or male-female roles, it’s a discussion about poopy diapers, so let’s leave social politics out of it, although, now that I think about it, poopy diapers and politics seem to go hand in hand.
Poopy diapers, besides being unsanitary, are uncomfortable. Once soiled, babies have no other recourse than to sit in their own waste until someone notices, and I’ve always considered it my job to notice. Sometimes I’ve noticed too well, and changed diapers that were perfectly clean.
“Don’t you know how expensive diapers are?” my wife would chastise me.
I gladly took the chastisement. Better a hundred clean diapers be thrown away, than one dirty diaper remain longer than absolutely necessary, to paraphrase Benjamin Franklin in a way he never expected. Voltaire and William Blackstone have also been credited with saying a different variation of our founding-father’s famous quote, but, when it comes to Voltaire, I don’t trust a man with only one name. As for Blackstone, isn’t he a magician? What does a magician know about the law, or changing diapers for that matter?
“Alla-kazaam! The dirty diaper has now disappeared!”
“Ahhhh! Where’s my baby?"
In time, I became a diaper-changing expert, offering unsolicited advice to anyone polite enough to not tell me to mind my own business.
“Always wipe away from the main event.”
“Make sure the diaper’s not too tight.”
“These aren’t the droids you’re looking for. Move along.”
I’m not a germaphobe, but even I know that nothing good ever grows in a poopy diaper. Ever hear of salmonella, norovirus, or listeria? Neither had I, until I looked them up for this article. Besides learning where the name of the mouthwash Listerine came from, I also learned that these are a few of the germs that can be found in dirty diapers. They can cause illness or sickness, sometimes even at the same time.
When changing your baby’s diapers, start with washing your hands first. You don’t know what you’ve touched, and you don’t want to know. Take it from me, your hands are filthy. They’re filthy because everything you touch is filthy. And what do filthy hands do? Filthy hands can spread the many germs that might cause your baby to get sick.
You don’t want that, do you?
I didn’t think so.
Since we’re on the subject of things that are filthy, something you may not realize is that the convenient diaper-changing stations thoughtfully installed by restaurants and businesses, those are filthy, too. During a simple diaper change, this contamination can transmit gastrointestinal disease-causing pathogens. I’m not even sure what pathogens are, but they sure sound bad.
You see, during the many diaper changes that occurred before you even got there, the diaper-changing table probably came into contact with dirty diapers, and the urine and feces that filled them like a calzone.
I know I’m guilty of contaminating the baby-changing station. Whenever I’ve used it to change my baby, I’ve alway put the dirty diaper to the side, out of the way, while finishing up the job. Oh, sure, I wrapped it up tighter than a Christmas gift from Scrooge, because I just roll that way, but it was still sitting on the table until I threw it away. You can bet I won’t do that anymore. In the future, I’ll just ask a good samaritan to hold the soiled diaper for me until I’m done. I’ve learned in life that if you hand somebody something, they’ll usually take it.
Personally, I always felt a deep satisfaction changing my youngest daughter’s diapers. It was one thing she couldn’t do for herself. When my wife would put a breast to her mouth, instinct would take over and she would suckle. What, as a man, could I do that was more important than that?
Change diapers?
Lucky me.
My father, on the other hand, never changed a diaper in his life. If one of his children soiled themselves under his watch, he would wait until our mother came home to take care of the problem. It was a different time, I’ve been told.
I suppose that’s true, but remembering how my little girl would smile and look at me with her beautiful eyes as I was changing her diaper, I can’t help but feel that my father missed out on something special.
Raising My Father
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JimDuchene.BlogSpot.com American Chimpanzee
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